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Your brand is how people feel about your business or products. It’s what they say about you when you’re not around. And it’s in your best interest that they say positive things.
But a strong brand doesn’t magically develop—you have to build it.
Traditional brand building relies heavily on intuition and creativity. Sometimes that intuition hits a home run, but sometimes it strikes out. Modern data, analytics and AI can make the branding process less about guesswork and more about predictable outcomes.
But if branding has traditionally been a wholly creative endeavor, where does data come into play?
This guide will explain what a brand strategy is, why data is critical to branding and how to develop a brand strategy on a foundation of data and customer insights.
A brand strategy is a long-term plan that defines who you are—as a brand—and how you present yourself to customers and prospects. It’s not just a name and logo; it’s your unique identity and personality.
When executed successfully, a brand strategy plays a powerful role in achieving business goals like meeting sales targets and growing revenue. Specifically, effective branding helps you improve marketing performance at all stages:
The intangible elements of a brand strategy get you noticed by consumers and create emotional relationships through resonance and trust. A strong brand strategy is an essential part of successful marketing.
Few marketers can afford to invest in intuition or guesswork—59% of CMOs say they don’t even have sufficient funds to deliver on their agendas this year. A brand strategy built on a foundation of data and customer insights is more likely to resonate with customers and produce a positive return on investment.
“We have a lot of clients asking about how we can integrate more data into their brand and content strategies to be more personalized to their consumers,” explains Nicollette Dineen, Senior Director of Strategic Consulting at Epsilon. “It's especially important not to just lean on what you think you know, but to look at the data and prove out those assumptions.”
Marketers can more reliably create an effective brand that wins over hearts and minds with a thorough understanding of the brand’s customers and market. Complete and accurate data is therefore necessary to inform crucial steps in developing a brand strategy.
Each of the following steps plays a role and builds upon the others to create a sound strategy. Once you put them all together, you’ll have a comprehensive brand strategy to guide the development of your marketing plans. And you’ll understand how to put the customer at the center of everything you do.
Start by understanding your brand purpose and values. Why do you exist? Who are you (or who do you want to be), and how do you want to show up in the world?
These elements of your brand strategy should align with your customers’ needs, preferences and expectations. For this step, lean into audience insights and social listening.
“We just did a project for a charitable client where we used data to determine what motivates their target audience to spend money, such as convenience or value,” explains Dineen. “These sorts of insights allow you to build a brand that will resonate with your ideal customers.
You need to understand what your direct competitors are doing and what’s working for them. But do this competitive analysis with curiosity and to understand, not as an outline for creating your own strategy.
Remember, your brand has an opportunity to stand out from the crowd. Mimicking their brand strategy is not a winning approach. But you should research all your competitors to understand what they offer, where they are strong, where they are weak and where your brand is different. This should start to highlight opportunities for you to differentiate as you develop your brand strategy.
Another component of this step is market analysis. You need to have an intimate understanding of the overall market, including your market position, trends and customer needs. It’s difficult to have clear sights on where you’re going and how you can win if you don’t understand the broader ecosystem.
At this stage, you can use transactional data, social listening and search data to understand:
For example, “We regularly complete share-of-voice analyses on popular hotel brands to see their share of mentions on social, and we use that as a measure of scoring brand health,” says Dineen. Use insights like these to look for white space opportunities, such as a customer need that no product or message is addressing.
Your ideal customers are a specific group of people your brand aims to reach and influence.
You may already have a strong sense of who these people are, but in this branding strategy exercise, take time to dig deeper. Consider both who your products and services are best suited for and who your actual customers are. To successfully reach and communicate with your ideal audience, you need to understand what they value and desire. You also need to know their pain points and long-term objectives.
This is the perfect opportunity to tap into Epsilon’s top-ranked consumer database for:
For example, you may find that who you think you sell to isn’t accurate. Maybe you think men are your primary buyers, but it’s actually the women in their lives who are buying and gifting products to them. This is exactly the type of nuance you need to understand before you start crafting your voice and messaging. Everything you learn about your audience will then inform your brand voice, messaging, visual identity and marketing tactics. They also influence your pricing strategy.
Words matter, but it’s also about how you say them and the overall vibe. This comes down to your brand personality, voice and tone.
Brand voice and personality is a great way to bring uniqueness and humanness to your brand. Consumers love brands that have something interesting to say. But be careful to ensure that your voice resonates with your target market. Brands that take their personality and voice to extremes risk alienating and even losing their customers.
This is the perfect opportunity to incorporate more data from social listening. Dineen explains, “We talk about meeting consumers where they're at, but we also want to speak the same language that they're speaking in. And I think a lot of times brands get away from that, and it comes off inauthentic.”
Use social listening to understand how consumers speak about your brand and your competitors, and consider how you can incorporate these insights into your brand voice.
This is where you start to define what makes your brand different from the competition via your tagline, messaging pillars, value proposition and brand positioning statement.
As you work through these elements, look to find a balance between how consumers perceive your brand, how your products or services benefit your customers and what your products do. Don’t forget about your target audience, their values and your voice, tone and personality. This will create a narrative that resonates with your audience and can offer a deeper connection to your brand and products.
Take the time to develop and test your messaging and positioning to ensure brand consistency across all channels and teams. Without this step, you risk inconsistent—or even contradictory—messaging, which makes it difficult to attract and retain your ideal audience.
Visual identity is the stuff you normally think about with a brand, like logo, typography, color, imagery, photography, illustration and iconography. Visual identity is key to developing brand awareness and recognition. This is necessary to build trust in the marketplace, which ultimately impacts sales and loyalty.
But before you start working through logos, colors and fonts, take a moment to revisit your audience, brand personality, purpose and voice. Think of this step as the visual translation of everything you’ve just outlined in earlier steps. Use all of the insights you have collected thus far to ensure your visual identity is relatable and memorable for your target audience.
Your brand guidelines serve as a playbook for how to use your brand in all communications and marketing materials.
Document your brand guidelines to help ensure everyone from employees to freelancers have the tools they need to uphold your brand strategy. These guidelines need to be comprehensive and provide enough direction for a writer, designer or marketer to create work that is “on brand.”
Now comes the fun part: activating all this brand work in your marketing efforts.
Once you understand the components of your brand strategy, you can make marketing and business decisions that reflect your purpose, values and mission. All these elements allow you to experiment in an authentic way. You can also reach and engage with consumers in more meaningful and emotional ways.
“There are a lot of brands out there,” says Dineen. “What makes a brand stand out? I think it’s a matter of whether they can speak to you where you're at, whether that be in a specific part of your customer journey, or whether that be aligned to your interests and values.”
And speaking to consumers where they’re at has never been more realistic—again thanks to data and the AI tools that allow us to act on it.
With the data available today, marketers can skip beyond traditional demographic and geographic segmentation methods and instead segment by behavioral data to connect with consumers more effectively.
Behavioral segmentation allows you to divide your customers into segments based on their behavioral patterns when they interact with a particular business or website. For example, some people buy toothpaste for whitening benefits while others seek comfort to their sensitive gums. Understanding these behaviors allows you to speak to each segment with the value proposition they care about most.
By processing large datasets quickly, AI helps marketers understand trends and customer preferences—and act on insights in real time. For instance, AI algorithms can identify emerging patterns in consumer behavior, such as shifting purchase intent, declining brand loyalty or new product affinities. This allows you to dynamically update audience segments and deliver more relevant offers at the right moment.
Consumers expect your display ads to line up with the last email you sent, which also needs to align with the in-store experience.
Connecting all of these disparate channels (and others) isn't an easy task; brands need to consider how their marketing and advertising technology work together, how their cross-channel teams work together, and (maybe most importantly) how data and information on their customers and prospects flows between all of these things.
This consistent, omnichannel experience is vital for strong brand recognition, trust and, ultimately, loyalty. But omnichannel success isn’t about being in every channel all the time. It’s about showing up in the right places—with the right identity-driven intelligence—to drive real results.
Activating your brand across the omnichannel journey requires three core components:
Brand development strategies are meant to adapt with time as your products, objectives, identity and purpose change. They should also change as your market and customers evolve.
You should therefore measure your brand performance over time and adjust as necessary. Many brands lean heavily on Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measure of brand performance. You can also consider incrementality testing and brand lift testing.
“To optimize your branding, lean back into search and social,” says Dineen. “ Social sentiment is huge—what's your brand sentiment? What’s your visibility there? What’s your visibility in search and generative engine optimization (GEO)? There’s so much data you can look into.”
Building a brand today is no longer a matter of intuition—it’s a matter of intelligence. The strongest brands are powered by the right mix of creative clarity and data-driven precision. As Dineen explains, “Branding is definitely still a mix of creative and science. The data makes the creative stronger.”
With Epsilon, you don’t have to choose between them.
Epsilon’s comprehensive consumer data, advanced analytics and AI-powered optimization give you the tools to understand audiences deeply, personalize authentically and activate messaging with confidence across every channel.
Get started with your data-driven brand strategy today.
This article was originally published on March 4, 2024, and has since been updated.
